


a light to burn all empires

by supinetothestars



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics), Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Doctor Who Fusion, Chameleon Arch, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Introspection, Romance, Sakaar (Marvel), Time Lady Carol Danvers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22580749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supinetothestars/pseuds/supinetothestars
Summary: Sometimes, Carol dreamed that she looked out the window of a silver domed room and saw the entirety of time and space laying around her, an infinite possibility beyond all that any human had ever known. She dreamed that she stood alone before every eternity, every existence. This was her favorite dream; that in which she stood in a control room in a swirling tunnel that was the helm of all that had or ever would exist. She could hold the hourglass of time and reality in her hand and shake it when she was bored._When Air Force pilot Carol Danvers' plane is shot down during a routine testing flight, she finds herself living the reality she's been dreaming about for decades.
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to my fantastic beta @fensandmarshes for improving this by at least 80% and also putting spaces in before all the dashes.

Carol always felt pulled towards the stars. It was as if a constant force was tugging her upwards, shaping her life story into a jagged line arcing up to the heavens, like every choice she’d ever made had only brought her closer to the sky. 

When they were young, Carol and her brother Steve would lay on a blanket in the grass outside their summer home and stargaze. Steve knew all the constellations by heart, and he taught them to Carol one by one, pointing each one out as the two of them languished outside during the warm Cape Cod summer nights while swatting mosquitoes from their skin. Once Carol had memorized all the constellations, she would make up new ones, finding patterns in the twilight and pointing them out to her brother. They’d trace the imagined lines of these constellations with their hands, and fight over who got to name them. 

Carol always wanted to be a pilot. When she told her family, they told her she might get to be a flight attendant one day, and expecting anything more than that was just getting her hopes up for nothing. She did the best in school out of all her siblings, and yet her dreams were more out of reach than any of her brothers’. Her father only had the money to send one child to college, so he chose Steve; the family favorite, the golden child. (As a child, Carol sometimes thought of Steve as the one her father came to closest to truly loving.) So Steve went to college, then followed the family legacy and joined the army.

Steve was killed in combat only a few months later. A part of Carol was buried with him - the part of her that kept her anchored to the Boston house where she’d grown up. After Steve died, Carol could see nothing but the heavens above her and what they might have in store. 

She joined the Air Force Academy and began to learn to fly. The stars, once out of reach, grew ever closer in her mind’s eye. On the other hand, her already tense relationship with her parents was utterly shattered by the news that she’d joined the Air Force instead of following the plan they’d carefully charted out for her - husband, family, three little grandchildren for her parents. 

(The dreams began the night she flew a plane for the first time.) 

The Air Force was a boy’s club, and its recruits were determined that it stay that way. Starting from her first day of training, over half her fellow students were dead set on driving her out. She nearly got caught fighting a few of them, and God knows her teachers would have loved the excuse to kick her out.

(Carol dreamed of charting new constellations and then venturing among them. Fantastical, irreverent adventures amid the stars. She dreamed of fighting in wars on foreign planets. She dreamed of a massive glass dome in a burnt red desert, with silver towers that stretched towards a red sky.)

She met Maria at the Air Force Academy. The first time they ran into each other, there was a spark of connection between them, friction as their abrasive personalities clashed and caught fire. All at once, the gravity keeping Carol’s feet on the ground felt stronger, the force drawing her towards the heavens rivalled by the strange pull keeping her at Maria’s side. The stars called to Carol, but Maria was on Earth, so the stars could wait. 

(In some of her dreams, she stood in a silver rotunda under a dome draped with thick cables connecting to a center control console. In her good dreams, the room shook and swayed beneath her feet. In her nightmares, the console’s lights flickered, and the alarms screamed at her to do something.)

Women weren’t allowed to fly combat, so Carol and Maria were assigned to pilot jets at a secret engine testing facility run by a Doctor Wendy Lawson. Carol was almost relieved at the tranquility the assignment brought. As easily as Carol cloud slip into the rhythm of a fistfight, as quickly as her heart beat at the prospect of a brawl, she couldn’t imagine having to wage war against other human beings. The thought made her skin crawl and her mind flash with images of crisply uniformed soldiers going to inform her parents of her death. Another image, worse, was that of Maria’s plane being shot down over enemy territory and falling to Earth in a barrage of flame and shredded metal. 

If that were to happen, Carol thought the string anchoring her to Earth might just break, leaving her gently floating upwards till she choked to death in the cold and empty sky. 

(In some of the dreams, there’s a library the size of a planet, and empty spacesuits roaming the shelves with shadowed helmets.  _ Vashta Nerada _ , the shadows were called, and they left darkness where they fed.) 

Some nights, Carol and Maria went stargazing. Carol would point out the constellations, one by one, until Maria knew them by heart. Laying on a woven blanket in the moonlight and watching time chip away at the night, she’d lace her fingers around Maria’s and hold her hand tightly, listening to the crickets singing, and wish that she could hold more of Maria than just her hand. There was a gravity to Maria that kept Carol orbiting around her, and if that gravity were to lessen, Carol thought she might lose the anchor that kept her from spinning into the void, becoming a lost and aimless traveller in an infinite nothing.

(Sometimes, the silver rotunda’s door would be open, and Carol would lean out, bracing her hands on the doorframe, and see storm clouds stretching below her in every direction. There would be a man clad in green armor falling towards the clouds, screaming something at her that was lost to the roar of the wind.)

Maria and Carol spent their vacation at the ocean. They trekked to the seashore and curled up next to each other on a blanket, watching the sky darken as the sun faded below the sea and twilight dawned. The cold wind bit through their jackets, so they tangled together for warmth. Gazing skyward, they made up new patterns in the stars. New constellations, new celestial beings to watch them from above. 

“I have these dreams,” Carol whispered to Maria, close enough to smell Maria’s perfume mix with the salty ocean brine. “That I’m up there. In space. Charting new worlds, fighting old wars.”

“Am I in your dreams?” Maria asked, and turned her head to look at Carol. Her gaze started at Carol’s lips and then flickered up to her eyes.

“No,” Carol said. “That’s the worst part. There’s never you, never anyone but me.”

“More like a nightmare, then,” Maria teased, but Carol didn’t laugh, because Maria was right, she was always right. 

“It’s just me,” Carol repeated softly. “Just me and infinity all around me.”

“Sounds lonely.”

“It is,” Carol said. “It’s the loneliest I’ve ever felt. Maria, do you ever feel like your whole life, it’s just been building up to something? Somewhere?”

“Someone,” Maria said, softly, and her eyes fixed on Carol’s. Carol could drown in those eyes.

Maria kissed her, and Carol forgot about the stars’ infinity. The only infinity worth having was their own, one of tangled limbs and sea-salt wind that caught them and carried them out of the world they knew. 

(That night, Carol dreamed that she was lost and drifting in the stars again, only this time the stars were Maria’s eyes and Carol wouldn’t leave them for the universe.)

  
  
  
  


Carol liked Wendy Lawson. From the moment Carol met her, their personalities seemed to just click. They worked well together; both of them had the kind of up-front, abrasive temperaments that would have worn away at anyone else’s patience, and yet with the two of them it just  _ worked.  _ Carol wasn’t used to being liked by a superior; since she was young, her managers had always deemed her to be uppity, brash, and insulting. Carol also suspected Lawson’s cat had influenced her opinion somewhat, as Carol was one of the few people whom the ill-tempered orange tabby actually liked. 

Wendy told Carol as much one day, when they met outside the P.E.G.A.S.U.S. testing facility to run a test flight in the newest experimental jet.

It was windy, and Carol tied her hair back to keep it from flying into her face as she stood out on the tarmac. Leaning against her red Camaro, she watched planes pass by on the horizon and waited. Her peace was disrupted by Goose, who, trotting a few yards ahead of her owner, started rubbing against Carol’s leg and pleading for attention. Carol reached down to scratch the tabby’s forehead.

“Goose likes you,” Lawson said as she approached, smiling and sticking her hands in her pockets. “She doesn’t typically take to people.”

Carol grinned. “Early start to your morning?”

“Ah, late night, actually. I can’t sleep when there’s work to do.” Lawson quirked an eyebrow at Carol. “Sound familiar?”

It did, but Carol laughed and brushed it off. “Flying your planes never feels like work.”

Lawson laughed appreciatively and nodded towards the jets soaring on the horizon. “Wonderful view, isn’t it?”

“I prefer the view from up there,” Carol said, eyes on the clouds. 

“You’ll get there soon enough, Ace,” Lawson told Carol, a smile creasing the corners of her eyes.

  
  


The experimental jet was like nothing Carol had flown before. It didn’t just fly, it glided so smoothly she hardly felt it moving at all; it seemed as though the ground was spinning below Carol as she hovered in the sky. Lawson, in the passenger’s seat, clutched at her safety restraints as Carol pushed the jet to fly faster, faster, faster.

Time didn’t seem to pass the same, when Carol was perched in a modern miracle above the clouds. When she flew, Carol felt like she was existing out of reality - like she could simply watch, unaffected, as the minutes ticked by on the ground below. Here, as she felt the way the controls of the jet hummed beneath her hands, she could have let hours pass and never noticed the difference. 

A few hours had gone by when Carol heard a sound from outside the jet, a metallic whirring followed by a flash of green light from above that caught her eye. She glanced up, through the windshield, and spotted a bright glint of silver.

There was something flying in the distance above - a jet-like silver contraption that didn’t look like any plane Carol had seen before. She stared at it, unsure of what she was seeing, then glanced down at her radar. It was clear. Faulty, probably; the jet was brand new, after all.

“Hey, Doc,” Carol said. “Look up. You seeing this?”

“What?”

“Right above us. Do you recognise it? It’s probably a new jet design, but I haven’t seen anything like it.”

There was an audible intake of breath from Lawson, and a muffled curse. “You good, doc?” Carol asked, studying the plane-like contraption. Its nose dipped downwards and it fell into a dive. As it came closer, Carol got a clearer view of its design - long and sleek, with bright blue lights streaking along the sides. 

“Carol,” Lawson warned, panic edging her voice. 

“What’s it doing?” The plane was drawing nearer, and as it came close enough that Carol had to squint against the sunlight flashing off its wing. Something green flashed from the front of it, and she heard the same metallic whirring that had alerted her to its presence in the first place. The green light clipped the edge of Carol’s jet wing, and she swerved violently to the side to avoid it. Her pulse was pounding in her ears. “The  _ fuck -” _

“No, no, no,” Lawson whispered. “They found us.”

“That’s no MiG, Lawson. Who the hell are they?” Carol yelled, glancing behind her at Lawson, whose eyes were wide and panicked.

“Those are the bad guys. Fly faster. _ Now. _ ”

“Yes ma’am.” Carol twisted back around and pulled on the throttle to speed up. Another flash of green light came from behind them - closer, this time, so she swerved downwards and cut the nose of the jet through clouds. Carol had no field experience, and yet the movements of the dogfight came naturally to her, like the steps of a dance she’d performed a thousand times before. 

“What do they want?” Carol yelled, pulling the jet’s nose up again to evade another flash of weapon-fire.

“Just  _ fly _ ,” Lawson snarled. Carol did. She let her instincts take over, swerving and narrowly avoiding a collision as the plane fell into line behind them, and sped up. It fired again, and she yanked the throttle violently forward.

It wasn’t fast enough. Weapon-fire clipped the wing, and the propellor roared as the entire jet started to shudder violently. Smoke and fire belched from the shattered metal. Carol cursed, and tried to regain control of the jet’s altitude. It started to tilt, and as she scrambled with the controls, the jet dipped into a dive towards the clouds below. 

For a moment, Carol’s world went dark. When she opened her eyes seconds later, a crash shook the jet. The tops of a forest of pine trees had smashed the windshield into a spiderweb of cracks. The plane skidded forward through the trees, crashing into the lake beyond, and all Carol could think was that she would prefer anything to dying in the same way Steve had, killed in combat by a faceless enemy.

The jet skidded violently across the lake and spun itself to a halt across the sand on the opposite shore. Carol’s helmeted head slammed into the control board and the world went dark again. When her eyes opened, all she could see was fire and smoke. She coughed violently, trying to catch her breath as her vision swam. The jet was utterly wrecked, laying in piles of burning rubble on the lakeshore. She couldn’t see. The air was clouded with upturned sand and smoke and the smell of burning metal.

Carol squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold onto consciousness through her jumbled, hazy thoughts. She heard someone shouting through the helmet’s radio, but could barely make out the words. She yelled something in response - what, exactly, she wasn’t sure- then discarded the helmet before it could ask more questions.

Pulling herself free from the pilot’s chair straps, Carol nearly tripped over the wreckage of the door in her haste to check on Lawson.

Lawson was slumped down in the passenger’s seat, unmoving, her head fallen backwards onto the seat behind her in apparent unconsciousness.

“Doc,” Carol said. “Doc?” She scrambled at the straps of Lawson’s helmet and then dropped it to the ground. Lawson blinked at Carol, her eyes struggling to focus as a murky blue liquid trickled down from a cut on her temple. 

“Your blood,” Carol said, numb. “It’s, it’s blue.”

“Yeah, but, ah,” Lawson responded, flashing a hazy grin, “how’s my hair?”

Carol coughed again, head spinning.

“Help me out, will you?” Lawson grunted, and Carol stooped a little to hook her arms under Lawson’s. Lawson staggered out of the seat and they limped clear of the rubble. Lawson stumbled to the ground as soon as the wreckage was behind them. Carol knelt on the sand next to her. “Lawson!”

“Captain,” Lawson said, struggling to catch her breath. “Captain - I’m not well. I think this is it. Carol - you have to listen to me. These wars. They’re bigger than you know.”

“Lawson, you’ve got a concussion,” Carol said, trying for reason and finding that reason was nowhere to be found. “You’ll be fine, you’ll be okay. Let me help you up. We’ve got to get out of here, Lawson, get you to a doctor -”

“That’s not my name,” Lawson interrupted. She grabbed Carol’s arms and held them tightly. “My name is Mar-Vell, I come from a planet called Hala -”

“Doc,” Carol pleaded, pulling her arms away. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“ _ Listen to me. _ You’re not Carol Danvers. You’re the Captain. You have to open the watch, my watch. It’s -” Lawson scrabbled at her uniform, hands shaking, and withdrew a silver fob watch from one of her pockets. She brandished it towards Carol. “Take it.  _ Take it _ .”

Carol took it and found that she was crying. The watch was burnished silver, coated in dust and grime, and she could make out circular carvings on the front. 

“I’m sorry,” Lawson whispered. “I promised to protect you but they found us anyway.” Her chest shuddered violently. “Open it.”

Carol’s hands shook. Her unsteady fingers searched for the latch.

(Sometimes, Carol dreamed that she was standing at a window hundreds of stories from the ground, watching two moons hovering above the lights of massive metropolis. In the dream, she pressed her fingers to the cold glass and studied the unfamiliar star patterns splayed across the horizon line.)

The watch fell open.

(Sometimes, Carol dreamed that she looked out the window of the silver rotunda and saw an endless thundering cyclone of reality stretching as far as she could see. She dreamed that the entirety of time and space lay around her, an infinite possibility beyond all that any human had ever known. She dreamed that she stood alone before every eternity, every existence. This was her favorite dream; that in which she stood in a control room in a swirling tunnel that was the helm of all that had or ever would exist. She could hold the hourglass of time and reality in her hand and shake it when she was bored.)

Carol’s world went dark.

(Sometimes, Carol dreamed that she was more than just human. She dreamed that she had lived for as long as the human race had existed, that this version of her was just a false forgery of a human being that thought itself to be real. In her dreams, Carol Danvers didn’t exist, but  _ the Captain _ did, and the Captain knew of realities beyond anything a human could hope to imagine.)

As she came to consciousness minutes later, sprawled amid piles of flaming wreckage on a smoke-shrouded lakeshore, she realized the truth that had been dancing out of her reach since Carol Danvers had been created seven years before.

Those weren’t dreams.

They were  _ memories. _

  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter Two: Flashback

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Captain braced her hands on the doorframe of the Tardis and leaned out, her hair tangling in the wind. Clouds, stretching out around the Tardis as it floated across Earth’s upper atmosphere, stifled the sunlight and turned the world gray as thick fog obscured the view and turned the sunlight into a faded prism of color.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in posting. I had a lot of trouble with this chapter and generally just...wasn't happy with it. But I'm gonna post it anyway because once this is over I can get to the Good Stuff! So stick around.
> 
> Many many thanks to my beta fensandmarshes for being wonderful. 
> 
> And yeah, this is a flashback to a few years in the past, so you can see how Carol and Mar-Vell got to where they were last chapter.

The Captain braced her hands on the doorframe of the Tardis and leaned out, her hair tangling in the wind. Clouds, stretching out around the Tardis as it floated across Earth’s upper atmosphere, stifled the sunlight and turned the world gray as thick fog obscured the view and turned the sunlight into a faded prism of color. As the Captain searched the clouds for a trace of green against the grayscale horizon, the Tardis shook violently as thunder echoed through the wrecked control room. A flash of cold light momentarily tinted the clouds blue.

The Captain, squinting through the fog, spotted the flash of the green armor she’d been searching for. The glint of Yon-Rogg’s green pattered Kree armor was barely visible as it plunged through fog and mist towards the ground miles below. The Captain watched him fall, impassive, as he screamed something at her rendered inaudible through the roar of the wind before being swallowed up and shielded from view by the fog. The clouds flashed with thunder again. The Captain stepped away from the Tardis doors and slammed them behind her, sagging against them and closing her eyes.

She was tired, something she hadn’t been for centuries. Tired of running, something that when younger she’d sworn she’d never do. But fleeing was the only option, and there were no other choices left. It had come down to two options. She could run from the Kree, become a fugitive of one of the most powerful empires in the known galaxy, and harbor a war criminal turned traitor to her own empire. Her other option was to let herself fall into the clutches of the Kree, who would use any means necessary to strip her of the information necessary to track down the Skrulls. Because something else the Captain had sworn she’d never do was to let the innocent fall into harm, which is why she couldn’t stand aside. The Kree refugees were last of their race, forced to hide from the Kree armies that would ravage any civilization to ashes simply to have the final word in the millenia long Kree-Skrull war. 

When Mar-Vell first approached the Captain, she had begged for help in righting the wrongs she’d committed during her time serving the Kree. She’d asked only that the Captain help her save what was left of the Skrull civilization, bringing the refugees to safety away from Kree weapons - many of which Mar-Vell herself had designed. Prior to her defection, Mar-Vell had been one of the most renowned Kree scientists and weapons developers alive. She’d spent decades creating machines with which to further coat the legacy of the Kree empire in blood, up until her defection to the side of the Skrulls a decade before.

Mar-Vell had been travelling in the Tardis for nearly seven years. Along with the Captain, she’d hidden the Skrulls on a distant planet far from Kree trackers, but ever since six months before, when the Kree had discovered that the Captain was responsible for the disappearance of the Skrulls, the Tardis had been pursued across the galaxy by a legion of Kree soldiers hell-bent on capturing them and memory-scanning the Skrull’s location out of them. Even when they travelled through time, escaped to some distant future, the Starforce soldiers equipped with vortex manipulators would track their artron energy through the time vortex and follow them. By the Laws of Time, the Kree couldn’t use time travel to directly change the outcome of the war - but at every turn, the Captain found that the Starforce was at her heels. Now, as she stood in a Tardis console wrecked by Yon-Rogg’s narrowly defeated lone attack, the Captain started to realize that perhaps the road had come to an end - they couldn’t run much further. 

Mar-Vell was sprawled by the Tardis console, which was crumpled and twisted like wet clay. Now, she staggered to her feet and leaned against a lopsided guard rail. Her cheek was bleeding from the fall and she was clutching a bruised side. Around her feet, rubble littered the ground from the console room Yon-Rogg had wrecked. An tinge of chemical smoke left her coughing as she tried to breathe. 

“He - you -” Mar-Vell struggled to get the words out, staring at the Captain in shock. “You pushed him, he’s going to fall - you  _ killed  _ him.” Her mouth curved into a triumphant smile. “I didn’t think you had it in you, Cap -”

The Captain gave her a cold look. “Don’t think so little of me, Mar-Vell. I break others’ rules, not my own. Yon-Rogg has a vortex manipulator, which means that he’s currently more likely to die of time travel addiction than gravity.” The Captain choked on waft of smoke and coughed violently. “He’ll be fine. Can’t say the same about us. We’ve only bought an hour or two.”

“That’s nothing.”

“That’s everything, Mar-Vell. If you learned anything from working with me I’d have thought it was to never underestimate time. We can sort things out in two hours.”

Mar-Vell straightened from where she was leaning against the rail and groaned, clutching at her side. The Captain pushed away from the doors and stepped over piles of wreckage - bent guard rails, discarded controls, strangely misshapen bits of charred wood. Books from the library had fallen off their shelves and now were reduced to ash that clouded the air as Carol kicked it up on her way to the center control console.

Yon-Rogg’s gravity manipulator gauntlets had crushed the console, leaving most of the buttons missing and exposing bits of wiring that were sticking out from the gaps where metal plating should be and sparking. The Captain held out her hand towards Mar-Vell. “Toss me the gloves in the drawer there, ‘Vell.” 

Mar-Vell stepped off the raised control platform to a wooden desk pressed against the wall, then slid open at least half the drawers before finally getting the right one. She tossed the welding gloves at the Captain, who put them on and pulled away the remaining metal panelling from the top of of the console, exposing the wiring beneath. 

“How bad is it, Cap?” Mar-Vell asked, stepping onto the platform to stand nearer to where the Captain was working and trying to peer over her shoulder. “Are we getting out of here?”

The Captain thrust a gloved hand into the wiring and pulled a section of it aside to peer at the mechanics underneath. She had to dig her boots into the floor to stay steady as the Tardis swayed beneath her feet, and Mar-Vell grabbed at a guard rail for support only for it to come off its hinges and nearly pull her over as it clattered to the ground. “It’s not looking good, ‘Vell. Time travel’s out of the question with the TARDIS so badly damaged and the Dematerialization Circuit needs repairs or replacement or it’ll shatter under the pressure of the Time Vortex as soon as we try to travel.”

“Shatter under the Time Vortex,” Mar-Vell said. “So what does that mean in regular old Kree? For those who didn’t grow up learning the ‘ancient and noble ways of Gallifrey’ -”

“It means that if we tried to time travel right now we would be scattered into living splinters to doom ourselves to eternal and unending agony at the metaphorical clutches of the Time Vortex,” the Captain said brightly. 

“Let’s not time travel,” Mar-Vell suggested.

“Let’s not,” the Captain agreed. “I have another solution.”

“Fixing the Tardis somehow?”

“Not quite, but that’s an excellent idea.”

“So let’s do it.”

“There’s the problem. We can’t.”

“Then what’s the solution?”

“Tell you later,” the Captain said. “We’re sort of short on time right now.”

The TARDIS swayed violently again, tilting to the side. The movement knocked Mar-Vell off the control platform, and as she rose from the cluttered floor she clutched at the smooth surface of the desk for support. “You said we had a few hours, Captain.”

“I meant until the Kree track our artron energy and promptly capture us for interrogation, torture, and memory screening followed by a ritual execution,” the Captain said, unperturbed. She discarded her gloves. 

“So why the rush?”

“Because we’re going to crash into a frozen forest in approximately -” The Captain sniffed a deep inhale. “Ten seconds. Pine trees, by the smell of it. Could also be fir. I’d grab on to something.” She jumped down from the control deck and crossed the wreckage to stand at the wall and wrap her hand around one of the glowing hole patterns for support.

“You’re fucking insane, Captain,” Mar-Vell realized. 

A moment later, the sounds of scraping metal and snapping trees were shortly followed by darkness as the Tardis’s collision knocked her unconscious.

When Mar-Vell woke, slumped on the metal floor, the Tardis was pitch black and silent. She brought a hand up to her head, winced at what felt like knives rattling in her brain, and squinted through the darkness to try and make out shapes.

A whirring noise came from somewhere to her left, and a light flickered on. The Captain was sitting up a few feet away, holding out her sonic screwdriver in an attempt to make out her surroundings. It cast enough light to throw the surrounding console room wreckage into sharp relief.

“Cap,” Mar-Vell grunted.

The Captain glanced over, eyes roaming the darkness - she probably couldn’t see Mar-Vell. “Stay where you are,” the Captain called. “I’m going to fix the lights.”

The Captain stood, causing bits of scrap metal to fall from her jacket. She held out her screwdriver and cast it around until the light landed on the control console. The screwdriver whirred again, and the round floodlight in the ceiling console flickered on. 

Mar-Vell had to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment as the console flooded the control room with light. When she opened them again, the Captain was peering at her from across the wreckage-strewn floor.

“You good?” The Captain asked, and Mar-Vell groaned a little and sat upright. 

“I’m fucking terrible,” she snapped.

“Ah, so about regular,” the Captain said, comforted, and beckoned her over. “Come and help me clear the wreckage around the console.”

Mar-Vell shook her head adamantly and closed her eyes with a groan, head still throbbing. She listened to the soft footsteps of the Captain pacing, frequently interrupted by the whirring of the sonic screwdriver or a crashing and flurry of curses as she tripped over a fallen bit of ceiling panel.

“Now’s a really good time to tell me about that solution you mentioned,” Mar-Vell said, draping her elbow over her eyes to block out the light.

“Working on it,” the Captain said. There was a huffing noise and a faint clanging, and Mar-Vell groaned, finally obliged to sit up. 

“I’m over here,” the Captain called from out of view, her voice echoing from the small laboratory connected to the console room.

“What’re you doing in there?” Mar-Vell asked, and there was a clanging as the Captain kicked some rubble out of the door of the laboratory, where it hit the console railing and fell. Mar-Vell stood with a grunt and walked over to the entrance of the laboratory.

“Chameleon Arch,” she said. “I’ve got one, I just detached it from the main console a century or so ago. It’s  _ gotta be somewhere _ .”

“What’s a Chameleon Arch?”

“The solution,” The Captain said, and swung open the cabinet. Shattered old beakers and metal instruments of indeterminate function piled the shelves. The Captain reached into the mess that was the top shelf and shifted aside piles of old metal junk until she found and withdrew a strange three pronged metal device that seemed like it was made to fit over a human head, attached to which was a fob watch.

“Gotcha,” the Captain said, triumphant, and picked her way through the rubble towards the twisted control console.

Mar-Vell stared at the Captain, who was now standing before the console and carefully digging through thick piles of sparking exposed wires with ungloved fingers. The Captain pulled a frayed gray wire from the tangle and fitted the end of it into the metal contraption she’d retrieved from the cabinet, then glanced at Mar-Vell and beckoned.

Mar-Vell walked up the rickety steps. “Uh, what are you doing there, Cap?”

The Captain finally looked Mar-Vell in the eyes and her expression wilted a little. 

“The Kree are tracking my artron energy signature,” she said. “The energy of Time Lords - so the only way I can buy us and the Skrull refugees time is by disguising my artron energy. And the only way to do that …”

She hefted up the metal device. “This is a Chameleon Arch. It rewrites cell biology. It can turn me into a human, this planet’s native species, and wipe my memory. It will erase any trace of my artron energy from the Kree scanners. The Tardis will produce a backstory - you just have to go along with it.. The Kree aren’t licensed to start a formal search for me on Earth. You’ll just have to blend in and they won’t be able to track us.”

“What if they do? What if they find us?

“Open the watch. It will restore...everything. Until it’s open, we’ll have time. The Skrulls will 

have time. They’ll be able to build forces, to restore their civilization. We just need to buy them more time.”

“Cap, that’ll be years from now.”

The Captain stared at Mar-Vell, and pressed the watch into her palm. “My essence, my memories, my artron energy - it’ll all be in here, ‘Vell. Keep it closed.”

Mar-Vell just nodded. Reaching up, the Captain pulled the Arch down onto her head.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and comments are my lifeblood so feed me pls


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She finds the Tardis in a forest.

She finds the Tardis in a forest.

The blue of the paint, chipped and faded, is tinted green by the veridian light filtering through the forest canopy. A layer of dirt and grime has built around its foundation, and the window glass has a spiderweb of cracks that glow in the sunlight. Vines, dropping down from the trees above, wrap the walls into the forest’s embrace, leaves curling around the edges and draping over the roof. The words at the top -  _ Police Box; Public Call _ \- are faded and can barely be read. 

Standing before it, her hands stuffed in the pockets of a stolen leather jacket and her face still smeared with ash from her plane crash two days before, the woman once known as Carol Danvers tries to fit this weathered old box abandoned in a forest into her memories of a magnificent machine that could travel through space and time. This police box stands like a crumbling monument, forgotten and fading, the only object touched by time for miles in every direction of endless forest canopy. It’s part of the scenery, now, the nature, as strange to humanity as the trees around it.

She steps up to the door and runs her hand over the chipped paint, splinters of wood fracturing against her fingers. For a moment, something in the wood panelling seems to hum under her touch, but the sensation is gone as soon as she focuses. She pushes forward, and the door swings open. The Captain steps up, over the threshold, into the room beyond.

It takes a moment to adjust to the darkness. The first thing visible is the glint of metal. Massive piles of wreckage are littered across the floor, dented patches of ceiling tiling bent out of shape as wires stick out of the open patches in the domed roof. The control room is circular, with an elevated center console, and where artificial light should be there is none. Sunlight renders the room visible even as the farthest reaches of the laboratory and library are cast into shadow. The warmth of the sunlight feels out of place here, among this cold metal and these darkened shadows. The wrecked room should feel strange, alien, unwelcoming, but as she steps over piles of metal to reach the console, it feels like coming home.

“Hello again, old girl,” she murmurs, wrapping a hand around the stair railing. The humming sensation returns - it’s faint, barely noticeable, but she can feel the Tardis vibrating under her hand in the same way that Goose had when he was purring.

She - Carol, the Captain, none of the above - wonders where Goose is now. With Mar-Vell dead -  _ Mar-Vell dead, and her world sways under her feet as the sunlight suddenly loses its warmth  _ \- the flerken will probably still be at the air base, where she was always beloved by the pilots even as she scorned them. They’ll take care of her there, and even though as the Captain glances around at the wrecked Tardis she knows it will feel empty without Goose’s company, she also knows that until the Kree give up their pursuit, the Tardis isn’t safe for anyone. 

Further than that, some part of her knows Goose’s presence couldn’t change the coldness of the metal railing under her hand. The world without Mar-Vell is simply a colder one, and that’s an emptiness that can’t be filled. 

There’s so much emptiness in the Captain now. So much love lost, leaving cold and empty space that drips like ice water through her heart and chills her bones. With the losses of too many lifetimes building up inside her, it’s as though Mar-Vell’s absence sucked the last brightness from life, even as the Captain is warmed by the ray of sunlight blazing through the Tardis doors. 

The Captain - but Carol Danvers, really, a part of her humanity left over from the crash - remembers how it felt to be mortal, to have an end, remembers the meaning granted to her embraces when those infinities during which she wrapped Maria in her arms lasted only seconds as opposed to the eternities she had spent inside the Tardis, alone and mourning and impervious to time. The meaning that ending had granted to her life as a mortal had let her love again, let her feel, and now as she stood once again untouched by the passage of centuries she could still remember and long for that love now lost.

~~~

It takes her an hour to get the Tardis engines working. The Dematerialization Circuit is damaged, rendering controlled time travel impossible, and most of the functions are out of service. The screen to enter coordinates, for one, is physically shattered beyond repair, with the wires frayed and sparking; the screens and holograms cracked, and the stabilizers practically rusting over. Even the chameleon circuit is beyond easy repair, explaining why the Tardis chose the out of place disguise of a police call box. She finds the sonic screwdriver; it’s discarded on the floor next to the rusted Chameleon Arch, and whirrs at her as she picks it up.

The only part still fully working is the teleportation circuits. With no control over coordinates and limited control over  _ when _ she lands, with no stabilizers to ensure safety, it’s a risky gamble, but when the Captain stares around at the wreckage left from Yon-Rogg’s last visit to the Tardis console, she finds it a small price to pay compared to what the Kree might do when they inevitably track her down. They’ve already found her once, charting new horizons with Mar-Vell, and now - with her Time Lord Essence restored, her artron energy will likely reappear on their scanners, turning every moment she stays on Earth in range of the Kree trackers another countdown to when hostile ships appear. 

She has to dig through wreckage to find what she needs to restore the engines to basic functionality. Thankfully, the engine itself isn’t based in the control room, so Yon-Rogg’s attack didn’t harm it, but the control console has to be literally bent back into place.

When basic functionality is finally returned, the Captain finally closes the doors, cutting off the sunlight warming the cold metal room, and uses the light of the sonic to navigate back over to the controls. Flipping the switches of the control board, she holds tight to the console and closes her eyes as, after years of disuse, the Tardis teleports yet again. 

  
  


The planet it lands on is covered in trash. The Captain opens the doors of the Tardis to find herself in the midst of a faded technicolor junkyard that stretches to the horizon line, with a smell of oil and fried engine parts so overwhelming she gags on her first breath before pulling her jacket collar up over her mouth. As she steps out of the Tardis, the ground squelches and her boot sinks through a thin layer of wet mud onto a bit of rusted metal. She holds her hand to her brow and squints around, her eyes burning at the exhaust fumes. 

The horizon is covered in wormholes, swirling with blue energy. As she watches, two of them flash with light and clumps of metal trash fall from them, causing a terrific crash and a puff of dust that momentarily clouds the horizon. 

The Captain starts to worry, as she gazes around, that she’s fallen onto some kind of uninhabited junkyard planet, cut off from communication. The wormholes in the sky could well be the closest thing to interaction from the outside galaxy this planet gets. She hadn’t had any idea of where she might land, but a chemical-polluted nightmare with a ruined ecosystem hadn’t been the kind of locale she was hoping for.

This anxiety is soothed when, having paced around to the opposite side of the Tardis - which, unfortunately, is looking even worse for wear and starting to blend in rather well with the trash it landed in - she spots a row of towers in the distance, shiny colorful stick-like figures that herald the existence of civilization on the edges of this sea of trash. The city, while on the far reaches of the horizon, doesn’t look so distant that the Captain shouldn’t be able to reach it with a few hours hiking.

The Captain circles back around and re-enters the Tardis. Sonic in hand, she starts dragging the biggest bits of wreckage - metal plating from the ceiling panels - out of the Tardis.

About an hour passes before the console room floor is mostly clear, and the Captain’s hands are raw from handling sharp metal. It’s starting to look properly like a console room again, so she tucks the sonic into her belt and is about take another look at the damage done to the control console when she’s disrupted by the sound of ship engines roaring outside the Tardis.

Stepping out of the open Tardis doors and ignoring the ugly squelch as her boots sink into a layer of chemical mud, the Captain stares as a monstrous metal hybrid of an assault fighter settles into the junk pile in front of the Tardis. With massive silver guns placed by the engines on both wings and a square box-like central console that’s lined with fluorescent lights, the ship is clearly designed for combat.

The Captain frowns and crosses her arms as the box console at the center of the ship begins to hum loudly. A roll-out metal pathway emerges and tilts towards the ground, providing an entrance as the lid of the box pops open and a face emerges.

The Captain isn’t sure what she expected- a Kree armoured Starforce fighter, or a Ravager pirate, maybe - but this woman looks surprisingly regular (if unfairly attractive). Wearing dark-plated armor, with war paint streaked down her face as the dark hair pulled back from her face flows in the wind, she catches the Captain’s eye and holds it as she stops halfway down the ship’s walkway to gulp down the last contents of her drink bottle and toss it aside. It lands on top of a stack of metal and rolls down into a puddle of chemicals with a clatter.

“Hi,” the Captain says, and the woman just sort of squints at her, bringing her hand up to guard against the sunlight that glints off the silver panelling of her ship.

“I saw your escape pod fall,” The woman says. 

“It’s a ship, actually,” the Captain reponds, tilting her head. The woman scoffs and shakes her head, then waves her hand a little as if to dismiss the topic. 

“Look, I don’t care about that. What species are you?”

The Captain paused and thinks about that for a moment. Obviously, marking herself out as a Time Lord isn’t the best idea for her first hour on a strange and probably hostile planet.

“Human.”

The woman scoffs again, then tries to descend the rest of the way down her ramp but sways a little and falls off the side. She lands in a trash heap next to what looks like a massive animal carcass. The Captain cringes, but the woman, seemingly unperturbed, stands and dusts herself off. 

“Are you alright?” the Captain asks. The woman climbs out of the trash heap and walks past the Captain on her way to the Tardis, which is looking a little worse for wear from the outside, standing tilted behind a pile of scrap metal. The Captain swivels where she stands to watch as the woman tugs on the Tardis doors, digging her boots into the dusty ground in a fruitless attempt to pry them open. 

“They’re locked,” the Captain says, “but by all means keep pulling.”

The woman stops tugging to turn and narrow her eyes at the Captain. “Then  _ unlock _ them, dipshit,” she hisses, enunciating each word as if delivering a threat - which she probably was. 

“Sorry, but I’d rather not.”

The woman steps around the metal junk piled in front of the Tardis to walk up to the Captain and crack her knuckles. Her arms are shielded in metal forearm cuffs that seemed to encase some type of technology, probably weaponry. The Captain resists the urge to reach for her Sonic.

“Lookie here, human,” the woman hisses. “I _ came _ here to find a new champion to enter into the Contest. Instead I found a sentient meat-sac who reeks of mud and chemicals and would probably faint at the sight of the blood on the arena floor. You aren’t worth shit to me, so I’m going to take what’s worth taking from your itty-bitty escape pod over there and you’re gonna to damn well let me.”

“And why should I do that?”

The woman reaches forward and shoves the Captain sharply backwards, causing her to stumble and almost fall over the discarded bit of Tardis ceiling laying on the ground behind her.  _ “And why should I do that _ ,” she mocks. “I’ll tell you why you should do that,  _ dipshit.”  _

She brings her fists up and smacks them together, causing the gauntlets encasing her forearms to spark and whir. As lights along the sides of the gauntlets flicker to life, the woman brings her arms up on either side of herself to aim her fists at the Captain.

The ship behind her starts to roar as the gun turrets on either side of the console jut forward sharply and start to glow with blue energy. The woman reaches her arms forward towards the Captain, and the massive cannons perched on her ship angle themselves and aim. 

“That’s why,” the woman says.

“Oh,” the Captain says. “Big guns. How original.” She’d resisted the urge to brandish her sonic, but part of her is somewhat relieved at the woman for providing an excuse as she tugs the screwdriver from her belt and points it at the woman’s gauntlets. With a whir and a sparking sound, the lights along the sides of the gauntlets power down and the glowing cannons on the ship droop and darken.

“What the-” the woman shakes the gauntlets, then smacks them together a few times to no avail. “The fuck did you do? Give me that-” she snatches at the sonic, and the Captain takes a quick step back and holds it out of reach. “I said,  _ give me that _ unless you want me to splatter your brain into mush all over your escape pod’s pretty blue paint.” The woman reaches down to her belt and comes up again hefting a large blaster gun, which she aims at the Captain.

“No thank you,” the Captain says, pushing the muzzle of the gun aside with a grease-coated palm.

“Oh,  _ fuck it _ ,” the woman snarls, and drops the gun. By the time it falls the woman’s already launched herself at the Captain, wrapping her neck in the crook of her elbow and twisting sharply to flip the Captain off her feet and onto her back. The Captain kicks the woman away and uses the delay to tuck her Sonic into one of her many inside jacket pockets and pry the zipper closed. The woman darts forward and grabbed the Captain’s arm, wresting it behind her back and forcing the Captain onto her chest with her cheek pressing into the dirt and dust choking her breath. The woman, holding the Captain’s arm at a tight angle behind her, pushes her boot into the Captain’s back.

“Told you not to fuck with me,” the woman says, and it sounds like she’s smiling. The Captain wriggles a little to test the woman’s hold and in response her arm is twisted painfully, causing her to grunt.

The woman’s hand suddenly presses against the Captain’s neck, with it a cold chill of metal and a sharp stabbing sensation as something metal latches onto the Captain’s skin and stays there, even after the woman withdraws her hand.

“ _ Ow, fuck _ , the hell was that?” the Captain demands. “Was that a pin? Are we sticking people with pins now? Jesus! Christ!”

The woman’s hands brush across the back and sides of the Captain’s shirt and belt, searching for weapons. “Your little stick thing, it’s not - ugh, nevermind.” She lets go, suddenly, and steps back, leaving the Captain to shake out her painfully sore arm, roll over, and sit up. 

“I want you to let me into your  _ ship _ now please, darling,” the woman says, crossing her arms and not moving to brandish another weapon. “I’ve had a really shitty day and I don’t think you need to be testing my patience.”

The Captain stands, holding her sore arm stiffly and patting at her belt for something to help her situation. She doesn’t want to use her sonic again just yet, not while this woman seems so hellbent on taking it. Her pockets come up empty, but her gaze drops down to the gun the woman discarded and she reaches to pick it up.

The woman grins. The expression looks sharp and cold, coming from her. “You gonna shoot me with that?”

The Captain holds the gun up, bracing the end against her shoulder as she aims it at the woman’s feet. It’s curiously still, none of the usual humming of laser weaponry, and when her eyes flicker to the indicator light by the muzzle she sees that it’s dark. The gun’s a dud, evidently, or in need of recharging. The Captain looks at the woman, standing arms crossed on a junk pile with the look of someone who’s just won a victory, and then at her ship, powered down except for a few blinking lights on the hull. She pulls the gun off her shoulder and hurls it at the woman’s head. 

The woman’s smirk disappears as the gun smashes into her armoured chest and shoves her backwards, knocking her off her feet. She recovers quickly, shoving the dead gun aside and sitting up, but in the time it takes her to get it together the Captain’s already made a run for the woman’s ship. Her sonic’s in her hand in a moment, and she brandishes it at the ship and causes the walkway to start to roll back into the console. The Captain leaps up, grabbing the edge of the walkway and pulling herself up onto the console right as the edge of the walkway disappears into the ship.

“Oh,  _ hell _ no,” the woman snarls, and as the Captain jumps through the open gap that is the automatic door into the piloting room beyond she can hear the woman scrambling to her feet. The woman makes a running jump and lands a grasp on the ship’s turret - an impressive jump, the Captain thinks, for a humanoid that’s recently been smacked in the chest with a heavy-duty laser blaster - but by the time she’s scrambled over to the entrance the Captain’s used her sonic to shut the bay door of the console’s entrance. 

Satisfied with her escape, the Captain glances around at the ship’s interior. It’s trashed, the floor covered in discarded bottles and a smell of alcohol lurking in the air, but the control board is right there for the using. She steps up to the main control panel, and when she reaches out to flick on the engine buttons, the ship starts to whir around her as the wings drop into place and the engines roar. The Captain can’t help but grin for the sake of it - the fight, the chase, the escape, she’s missed this energy - and when she looks up out the windshield and begins to guide the wings into place, the woman is perched in front of it, behind the glass door, hands clutching at the metal panelling for support as she kneels before the entrance. She makes eye contact with the Captain, eyes narrow and angry, and the Captain notices that she’s holding a small black device with a button on it - some sort of remote.

The metal device on the Captain’s neck hums, and the last thing she feels before oblivion hits is the pain of electricity coursing through her veins.

~~~

**_Fear not, for you are found._ **

The Captain groans. Her head is pounding, and her wrists are strapped to the arms of a painfully rigid metal chair. She opens her eyes and finds herself sitting in front of a rusty-looking machine wall.

**_You are home, and there is no going back. No one leaves this place._ **

A light feminine voice is narrating, her words echoing through the room as the chair whirs and starts to move forward on some kind of track.

**_But what is this place? The answer is Sakaar._ **

The machinery fades, lights darkening into darkness dotted with stars, and suddenly the Captain is travelling through the reaches of space.

**_Surrounded by cosmic gateways, Sakaar lives on the edge of the known and unknown. It is the collection point for all lost and unloved things...like you._ **

The chair speeds up, leaving stars behind as planets and galaxies come into view around it. The Captain presses her head backwards against the chair, fighting the urge to vomit.

**_But here on Sakaar, you are significant. You are valuable. Here, you are loved. And no one loves you more than the Grandmaster._ **

A planet comes to view ahead, a faded and jagged rock surrounded by what look like glowing portals scattered around the planet’s orbit. The chair runs straight through it like it’s made of air.

**_He is the original, the first lost and the first found. The Creator of Sakaar and father of the Contest of Champions._ **

Like pop-up images in a storybook, images flash on either side of the chair, one-dimensional images playing out scenes as the voice narrates. There’s a man standing in shadow as a city builds itself around him, a pair of gladiators sparring in a massive arena, blood spilling across the floor as they beat each other bloody.

**_Where once you were nothing, now you are something. You are the property of the Grandmaster._ **

The images fade and blur as the chair speeds up once again, morphing the walls into streaks of color. Nausea overtakes the Captain as the momentum presses her body back into the rigid metal of the chair.

**_Congratulations! You will meet the Grandmaster in five seconds. Prepare yourself. Prepare yourself._ **

The morphed colors on the wall fade into deep red and the Captain screams as the chair plummets forward.

**_You are now meeting the Grandmaster._ **

Everything stops at once.

  
  


The distorted red walls, all that could be seen just a moment before, are replaced by a modern-looking sunlit room, a stage with a throne sitting before a window overlooking the peaks of a city. The female voice is gone, replaced by the quiet mumbles and hums of the city outside the walls, the clanking of armor from the guards assorted at various positions around the room. The Captain’s head is still spinning, but the vomit-inducing momentum is gone. She tugs at her wrists, but they’re still locked into the chair.

There’s a man sitting on the throne, another humanoid. He’s older than the kidnapper woman, who stands next to the throne with her arms crossed and gives the Captain a pissy look; but not that old, as evidenced by the streaks of dark still in his graying hair. He’s wearing some kind of preposterous golden bathrobe type outfit and squinting at the Captain in the manner of an old woman examining a vegetable at the grocery store to decide whether it’s worth buying

“Hmm,” he says. “Hmmm. Hm. She’s, she’s different, I gotta say, One-Four-Two.” He glances up at the woman as he speaks, but she doesn’t break her hostile stare at the Captain.

“I wasn’t going to bring her in, but she threw my dead gun at me and almost stole my ship,” The woman- One-Four-Two - says, and her voice says she hasn’t forgiven the Captain for that particular incident. 

“Ooh, exciting,” the man says, and he grins a little. “Well, well, I don’t think she’ll get very far, but maybe I could do something with her. You know. Opening number or something, put her in for a nice interesting bloodbath before the main attractions. You know how the crowd loves that sort of thing.”

“Mm,” One-Four-Two says by means of acknowledgement. “Yeah. She has this little - metal stick thing, it’s in her jacket somewhere, it made a whirry noise and turned off my gun.”

“Well, that’s, that’s unusual, but could be interesting in the arena,” The man says. “You know, we play up the drama of the whole affair, give her opponent a gun, she almost wins by shutting it down, but he grabs her by the ankles and smashes her head in, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds fun,” One-Four-Two says.

“Sounds terrible,” snaps another woman, a humanoid on the other side of the throne that the Captain had dismissed as some kind of bodyguard. “I think she’s trash. I think she’ll be terrible and boring.”

“Oh, oh, don’t be so negative, Topaz,” the man scolds. “I was a little skeptical too, but One-Four-Two here, oh, I love when she visits. She always brings me the loveliest presents. And this, this little woman here, she’s, she’s - well, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt,” he says, apparently at a loss for a suitable compliment. “Maybe she’ll surprise me. I love surprises. What’s your name, darling?” he asks the Captain, leaning forward a little in his throne.

“The Captain,” the Captain says. The man frowns and asks the usual question.

“Just the Captain,” the Captain clarifies.

“Oh, no, no, that just won’t do,” the Grandmaster says. “Only I get ‘the’ before my name, darling. You need a proper name if I’m going to put you in my arena.”

The Captain calculates for a moment, eyes the strange sparking staff-weapon that Topaz is holding, and decides it’s best not to test her new host’s patience. 

“Captain Danvers.”

“Davers!” The man says, apparently delighted. “Lovely name. I’m the Grandmaster, you might have heard of me.”

The Captain frowns at him. So this is ‘the Grandmaster’; the benevolent founder and ruler about which the nightmare simulator machine had narrated. He would honestly seem less out of place playing a mall Santa. 

“I’m rather beloved around these parts, if I might say so myself,” the Grandmaster confesses. “Bit of a celebrity. A dictator, but a, a celebrity too.”

“That’s nice,” The Captain says, and gives him a smile that’s strained by the effort not to say anything regrettable. “Say, I don’t suppose you’d consider letting me go?”

“I don’t suppose, no,” the Grandmaster says, tone altogether agreeable. “But don’t worry, you’ll have a fantastic time in the arena, I’m told it’s quite exhilarating up until the death parts. Here, I’ve been a terrible host, let me show you around a little.” He grins and stands from the throne, stretching his arms over his head and yawning. As he descends the steps of the stage and strolls past the chair into the hall behind it, the chair swivels and hums as it follows the Grandmaster’s path. 

The whole throne room looks like some odd mismatch of modern art and retro arcade aesthetics, with neon lines of light travelling up the jagged edged walls and the back of the room expanding into a large forum-type hall. There’s clusters of people, many of them of unidentifiable species, almost all of them armed. Some of them are bent around game tables, others swaying to strange disjointed rhythms issuing from boomboxes. It’s one of the latter crowds that the Grandmaster finally stops at, strolling up to a table stacked with glowing neon boombox equipment and cheerfully flicking a row of buttons on it. The sounds issuing from the equipment warp and shudder, sending unpleasant vibrations through the chair that put the Captain’s hair on end. 

“See, I like making music sometimes, it’s a hobby of mine,” the Grandmaster says pleasantly, smiling as he causes the boombox to issue a strange keening sound not unlike a dying cat. “Wonderful party talent, too. Really just brings the life into a gathering. See? Look at all these people! Look how much fun they’re having!” He grins and gestures around the room with the hand not busy doing questionable things to the boombox equipment. He’s right; the assortment of dancers seem pleased with the new musical developments. Even those not dancing are swaying to the beat; a cluster of conversationalists perched on a nearby couch seems to be shifting side to side with the rhythm.

“So you’re a DJ,” the Captain says, when the Grandmaster raises an eyebrow at her as if expecting a response.

“DJ? What’s that short for, hm?”

The Captain frowns at the sudden realization that she doesn’t know in the slightest. Better say something, anyway, he’s waiting for an answer. “Disco...jam. Disco jam man. Because you - ah. Yeah.”

He laughs, delighted. “Disco jam man! Oh, that’s funny, I like that. You’re quite entertaining. Very clever. Hey, guys!” He waves at the nearby group of swaying conversationalists. “Come listen to what this human just called me! Tell them, Davers, tell them-”

“Oh,” the Captain says. “Disco Jam Man. I said he’s a Disco Jam Man.”

The aliens all squint at her. She runs her eyes over their assorted faces, taking in the different species, and her gaze stops abruptly on a pale man in a yellow cloak. He looks familiar, and as she squints at him it becomes abundantly clear why.

“Loki!” She gasps, face breaking into a grin. “Loki, come ‘ere-”

Loki looks horrified, the blood draining from his face. The Captain stops and frowns, wondering why he looks so horrified to see her. The last time they’d parted it had been on relative good terms, with her having visited the kingdom of Asgard to sort out some trouble within the borders. She’d rather gotten along with Loki, the suave if problematic court pariah. He found her clever, and she found his efforts funny.

Now, though, his features are drawn with angry disbelief as he stands and stalks over to her chair. 

“ _ Captain? _ ” he asks. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’d ask the same of you,” she says. “Also, yellow capes? Really? What happened to the noble crest of Asga-”

“ _ Shut up _ ,” he snaps. “Don’t say that name. I don’t work for - that place - anymore.”

_ Touchy subject. Noted. _ “So you work for...Sakaar? Are you a court official here?”

“I’ve simply become -  _ popular _ , here, among the upper circles,” Loki says, and his hushed tone tells her more about his status here than his words. “It’s none of your business and frankly, I don’t see why you’re here at all and I don’t  _ appreciate _ you disrupting.”

“Well look, hon, you want to get me out of here, be my guest,” she hisses, voice fading to a whisper. “The guy who leads this place is insane and he says he’s going to put me in some sort of arena to fight people, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here.”

“Ooh, whispering,” the Grandmaster says loudly, reminding them of his presence by the boomboxes, and they both jump in surprise. “How mysterious. You’re not plotting anything too sneaky now, are you?” He winks. “I’d hate to lose the finest new addition to my court.” His gaze drops to Loki as he says this, and his grin is sharp. “So tell me, how do you two know each other?”

“Oh, we’ve just ran into each other before,” Loki says, and gives the same kind of fake smile the Captain had seen him give back on Asgard. “Once or twice. You know, people like us, we get around the galaxy. Know a lot of people.”

“Oh, how lovely,” the Grandmaster says, and he’s still giving that sharp grin. “I guess you’re already popular around here, huh, Daver!” His voice drops down to a conspiratorial tone, and he steps around the boomboxes to approach the Captain’s chair. “You know, I rather like you, Davers. You’re funny. I’m going to cut you a deal. If you can survive your first arena fight, I’ll let you get out of the Contest and join my court.” 

He chuckles, like he’s just made a terrific joke. “All you need to do is survive, darling. Good luck with that.”

The Captain swallows, and when she meets Loki’s eyes, they’re cold and distant, offering no help.

  
  



End file.
